Dear Jomrade,
This week we’ve published:
- “Singapore This Week”, by Jom
- “Why Singaporeans should boycott (most of) the World Cup”, by Abhishek Mehrotra and me
Jomfest, 1-6pm, May 19th, ACM. Early-bird pricing is over. We’ve sold over 100 tickets but still have some regular-priced ones left. Get yours now.
On Monday Jom hosted our first-ever Zoom book club. Was lovely to see 80 of you videoing in from around the world. We shared anecdotes, podcasts, literature, and lots of laughs. “No more Monday blues”, one said. And on that note, I’ll hand over to Zaid to tell you about the next.
Jom Baca book club: Unease with Ahmad Zaid
From April 7th to May 20th, we’re reading Unease: Life in Singapore Families by Teo You Yenn. Next Monday, we'll be hosting the discussion of Chapter 2, Doing Families: The Texture of Unease and Chapter 3, Inside Families: The Making of Kiasu Parents.
📆 Monday April 27th 2026
🕑 8pm - 9pm
🎙 Discussion led by Abhishek Mehrotra, Jom’s head of content
Over on the Jom Baca Telegram group, readers compared the feeling of unease to balancing on a pilates ball and deadlifting. This comment resonated with many members:
“Parents put so much effort into trying to control the outcome - spending money on tuition, painstakingly supervise homework, and fighting for spots in good schools. But because the future is inherently unpredictable, that underlying anxiety never really goes away.
It is always nagging in the back of mind: ‘Am I making the right bet for my kids’ future with the limited time, money, and energy I have?’”
Discussions are ongoing throughout, so drop in any time.
PSA: Want to know what a scam looks like? This man recorded a video call showing a crook impersonating a Singapore police officer. Share with your loved ones, stay safe.
Next Friday, May 1st, Jom will be at the Labour Day Rally at Hong Lim Park, 3-7pm. Hope to see you there. It’s the fourth iteration organised by Workers Make Possible, and its first in collaboration with SG Climate Rally, two organisations we like. In “Singapore This Week”, we talk about the evolution, meaning, and importance of this actual grassroots movement (read: not like those events organised by highly-paid bureaucrats on a whistle-stop SES tour of the common person’s milieu).
- Lego wars, AI female war-influencers, and the ongoing, online slopaganda war
- Why you should attend next Friday’s Labour Day Rally at Hong Lim Park
- Of Starbucks, straws, and corporate greenwashing
- By caning adolescent bullies, are we perpetuating the cycle of violence?
- Does Singapore’s first Circular Fashion Week signal a shift in our consumption behaviour?
Above are the issues we chose to explore in more depth.
Other news this week included: Ong Ye Kung on balancing technological surveillance with privacy concerns; Vivian Balakrishnan on keeping the Malacca Straits open; Singapore and Malaysia emphasise diplomacy and energy resilience amid Middle East conflict; “No room for reactive governance”, says Chan Heng Kee, new civil service head; SGX proposes stricter KPI and executive pay disclosure rules; good summary of that Bloomberg trial’s hearing by TOC; Singapore executed a man for trafficking weed; the UN’s human rights chief expresses concern about the continuing spike in executions for drug-related offences here; one in three new lawyers may quit within three years due to workload, workplace culture, and mentorship gap; activist Kokila Annamalai responds to her POFMA charge; a 40-year-old jailed after assaulting his 74-year-old father and repeatedly locking him out of their flat; JC student suspended after allegedly trying to film females in a women’s toilet on campus; longer waits for driving lessons and tests; more women in their 40s giving birth; CNA feature on Singaporeans who left the corporate world to become farmers in Johor; the Singaporean temple going viral amongst Thais looking for love; open-concept massage establishments will no longer be exempt from licensing; and two cockerels chasing each other across a busy road narrowly avoid a passing car.
“Why Singaporeans should boycott (most of) the World Cup”, by Abhishek Mehrotra and me
In a little under two months, the 23rd edition of the world’s largest sporting event will kick off in Canada, Mexico, and the US. Like other liberals who grew up watching football, Abhishek and I have become increasingly disillusioned, if not furious, with the corruption and sportswashing of FIFA, especially under current president, Gianni Infantino.
We’ve had enough. A few months ago we decided to write this piece, and have timed it for the commercial cycle: Mediacorp’s, Singtel’s, and Starhub’s early-bird sale ends on April 30th. You can read our argument in the essay. Here, I’d like to discuss why this is an important piece for Jom, and why we include the fudge, “most of”.
Unlike 20 years ago, there’s now a surfeit of political commentary here. What’s missing is good business and financial journalism. Why? It’s largely because of advertising-driven business models. Not just the mainstream media, but many “independent” channels and creators are heavily reliant on advertising dollars from Temasek-linked and other firms. It’s one of the reasons, in my view, that you’ll never see really hard-hitting pieces against, say, our insurers, no matter how many times they hike your premiums (and then refer you to the fine print).
This was a key reason Charmaine, Waye, and I co-founded Jom with a reader-funded model. This affords us true independence to write the kind of piece we’re putting out today. I hope my friends at Singtel and Starhub don’t take this personally. As we argue in the piece, FIFA’s gravy train is long, stretching from Zurich to the Cayman islands. Global change often requires local action. (Aside: dissolving our Jom ego, I’m sure our broadcasters won’t give two hoots about the position our little fledgling unit adopts. One day, hopefully.)
And on that note, if you believe in our mission, join 2,000 members keeping Jom independent. From S$10/month—full access, no compromises.
Next, why doesn’t Jom argue for an outright boycott? Why do we say “most of”? This essay allowed us the space for the clearest articulation of Jom’s approach to progressive social change. I think it’s easiest if I just share a few paragraphs from our essay’s conclusion:
“The history of progressive social change is littered with instances of sanctimonious overreach by the extreme left. For instance, it’s better if omnivores (especially in the rich world) eat less meat—for their health, for animals, for the planet. But draconian demands to, say, immediately discard all leather and animal-based products in the household, as we’ve witnessed, reveal an insufficient level of care and empathy about tradition and the human condition…
With any social change, people need not just convincing through reason but pathways to change that honour the multitude of competing tensions in their lives.
Yes, there are areas that demand a greater urgency of action. They’re usually those where there is imminent harm to other humans. Two examples we can think of are the death penalty and racism…
So what do we mean by “boycott (most of) the World Cup”? Do what you can. Baby steps. Maybe just limit yourself to the 28 free-to-air games…If you absolutely have to buy a package from Mediacorp/Singtel/Starhub, maybe share it with a group of friends—for example, rather than five homes having subscriptions, all can occasionally gather at one. Circumstances differ between groups and individuals. You need to figure out what works for you, always aware of the imperative of ethical consumption. One way could be to use some of your precious time and money on supporting local sport instead of FIFA.”
Jom fikir,
Sudhir Vadaketh, editor-in-chief
Jom
Jom on our complicity
Jom
John Lee
Jom
SG Climate Rally
Singapore This Week
Society: Slopaganda
“Wake up, America, open your eyes to the devil’s design,” goes a rap song about Israel’s apparent ultimate ambition: to nuke the US. Its music video begins with an Iranian MC dressed in fatigues in a war-room and ends with a shot of Americans in chains in front of a burning Golden Gate bridge. The words are spit relentlessly: Israeli deception; American destruction from Indonesia to Panama; and elite protection and privilege, starring Jared Kushner, Jeffrey Epstein, and others. All told through cutesy Lego characters, and all the product of generative AI (GAI). “The subject matter is deathly serious—international war, unfolding in real time, killing thousands—yet the visual vocabulary is preposterously trivializing,” said The New Yorker. (Its creators told the magazine they’re Iranian students.)
In case you missed it, the ongoing slopaganda war is perhaps as important, and certainly more entertaining, than the actual one. (Slop is a subset of GAI.) For those who like voluptuous blondes in tight uniforms, enter Jessica Foster. She accumulated over a million followers on Instagram through photos of herself in proximity to weapons and their masters, including in the Oval Office. She’s “the apotheosis of what MAGA fantasizes about, all packed into one channel, but it’s obviously AI”, an interviewee told The Washington Post. Meta removed her account, though she’s just one of many AI-generated sexy female soldiers—American, Iranian, you name it—fuelling the war machine and grotesque manosphere fantasies.
Indeed, the intersection of war, feminism, and sex appeal is perhaps the most troubling form of slopaganda. In “The New Era of War Propaganda”, Alice Cappelle proposes three evolutionary stages: the feminist push for military inclusion; the military’s “girlbossification” (in the 2010s); and today’s “female war-influencers in a post-truth world”. In the last two decades, feminism has been reduced by politicians, Cappelle says, to “a buzzword to manufacture consent for more and more interventions, more and more death of women, but also destruction of their homes, their universities, their schools, their hospitals, and workplaces.” Foster was ultimately tied to an Only Fans account. Notions around online entrepreneurial autonomy and farce complicate the issue. “And that's precisely what makes this form of gendered war propaganda so powerful. It escapes criticism because it constantly flirts with irony, with the possibility that it is not something to be taken seriously,” said Cappelle.
Wonks who worry that the zone is being flooded with brain rot should be more concerned that their talking heads will one day be replaced by GAI. USA TV Digital, a relatively small “digital creator” with 12,000 Facebook followers, wants to appeal to a leftist literati with the patience to sit through 20-minute audio diatribes. Welcome to political pontification with AI Bill Clinton. In “Most people DON’T REALIZE Trump’s Ceasefire is WORSE Thank You Think!”, a single, static visual of the 42nd US president accompanies his signature, ArkLaTex Southern drawl. The machines have even replicated his signature self-regard, as he pats himself on the back for his negotiation nous during the Dayton Accords, before asserting: “An open-ended ceasefire, with no clear terms, gives the other side exactly what they need most: time.” Leon Perera, former MP, told Jom he “found the analysis fascinating as an example of applied IR theory. I watched to the end (I rarely do).”
Jo Teo, physicist and commentator, said that: “2025 was the year of TikTok protests, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of AI slop warfare”. Ahead of GE 2025, the government banned “deepfakes of candidates during elections”. Given that AI offers a leg up to under-resourced adversaries, should we expect even more sophisticated laws by 2030?
Some further reading: “Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI” by three media scholars. “In summary, slopaganda has unique features (targeting), unique magnitudes of features (scale, scope, speed), and unique qualitative improvements (persuasiveness) that together make it distinct from any prior form of group influence strategy…By its effects on individuals, slopaganda poses challenges at a group level, which can only be addressed by new solutions and not those that may have worked with earlier manifestations of political rhetoric and propaganda.”
Other stuff we like
weekend culture’s May edition. Music, drawing, poetry, curated around the theme of labour. “We’re diving head-first into explorations of process, workmanship and creative community.” From May 22nd-30th.
“The AI slopification of the Singaporean Internet”. The latest blogpost by the Singapore Samizdat, which is written by ST's Teo Kai Xiang.
European Film Festival (EUFF) 2026. For its 35th edition, expect 30 screenings from 24 countries across Europe—from dark family dramas to offbeat comedies, psychological thrillers, and an Oscar-winning animation. April 9th-May 24th.
A flavour of Jom. Occasionally, Jom publishes essays outside the paywall. These are on issues we think are in the public interest, and deserve a wider airing. In the past two years, we have published nearly 50 such pieces. Read some of these if you’d like to see samples of our work. We hope they’ll convince you to subscribe. And even if you’re here with no intention of doing so, we hope you’ll enjoy these offerings and consider it time well spent!
